In this article we investigate what happens to the children who are brought to a new country along with their parents, and how they, now young adults, narrate ‘self’ as a migrant child and adolescent in different temporal and spatial contexts. We draw on five long narrative interviews with young women who were born in Latvia and came to Finland during their childhood. For our analysis of these narratives, we coin a notion of ‘fateful wellbeing.’ The research participants’ challenges as child migrants, where geographical displacement was compounded by language changes and discontinuities in schooling, as well as ruptures with family members and friends, are re-valued and appropriated through the self-development skills of reflexive narration. Within the concept of fateful wellbeing, youth transitions involve both constrained agency and choices towards wellbeing. We argue that reconciling difficulties is a vital part of fateful wellbeing

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This paper is in closed access until it is published.

Sponsor:

Kone funded research ‘Families on the move Across Borders: Children’s Perspectives on Migration in Europe’ (2012-2014) and Academy of Finland funded project Inequalities among transnational families in Nordic-Baltic space (TRANSLINES) (2016-2019)